Object-Oriented Programming Concepts teaches you the core concepts behind

object-oriented programming: objects, messages, classes, and inheritance. This lesson

ends by showing you how these concepts translate into code. Feel free to skip this
lesson if you are already familiar with object-oriented programming.

Language Basics describes the traditional features of the language, including

variables, arrays, data types, operators, and control flow.

Classes and Objects describes how to write the classes from which objects are
created, and how to create and use the objects.

Interfaces and Inheritance describes interfaces—what they are, why you would
want to write one, and how to write one. This section also describes the way in which
you can derive one class from another. That is, how a subclass can inherit fields and
methods from a superclass. You will learn that all classes are derived from the
Object class, and how to modify the methods that a subclass inherits from
superclasses.

Numbers and Strings This lesson describes how to use Number and String objects
The lesson also shows you how to format data for output.

Generics are a powerful feature of the Java programming language. They improve the
type safety of your code, making more of your bugs detectable at compile time.

Packages are a feature of the Java programming language that help you to organize
and structure your classes and their relationships to one another.

Lesson: Object-Oriented Programming Concepts

If you've never used an object-oriented programming language before, you'll need to
learn a few basic concepts before you can begin writing any code. This lesson will
introduce you to objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, and packages. Each
discussion focuses on how these concepts relate to the real world, while
simultaneously providing an introduction to the syntax of the Java programming
language.

What Is an Object?

An object is a software bundle of related state and behavior. Software objects are
often used to model the real-world objects that you find in everyday life. This lesson
explains how state and behavior are represented within an object, introduces the
concept of data encapsulation, and explains the benefits of designing your software in
this manner.

What Is a Class?

A class is a blueprint or prototype from which objects are created. This section
defines a class that models the state and behavior of a real-world object. It
intentionally focuses on the basics, showing how even a simple class can cleanly
model state and behavior.
What Is Inheritance?

Inheritance provides a powerful and natural mechanism for organizing and structuring
your software. This section explains how classes inherit state and behavior from their
superclasses, and explains how to derive one class from another using the simple
syntax provided by the Java programming language.

What Is an Interface?

An interface is a contract between a class and the outside world. When a class
implements an interface, it promises to provide the behavior published by that
interface. This section defines a simple interface and explains the necessary changes
for any class that implements it.

What Is a Package?

A package is a namespace for organizing classes and interfaces in a logical manner.

Placing your code into packages makes large software projects easier to manage. This
section explains why this is useful, and introduces you to the Application
Programming Interface (API) provided by the Java platform.

What Is an Object?
Objects are key to understanding object-oriented technology. Look around right now
and you'll find many examples of real-world objects: your dog, your desk, your
television set, your bicycle.

Real-world objects share two characteristics: They all have state and behavior. Dogs
have state (name, color, breed, hungry) and behavior (barking, fetching, wagging tail).
Bicycles also have state (current gear, current pedal cadence, current speed) and
behavior (changing gear, changing pedal cadence, applying brakes). Identifying the
state and behavior for real-world objects is a great way to begin thinking in terms of
object-oriented programming.

Take a minute right now to observe the real-world objects that are in your immediate
area. For each object that you see, ask yourself two questions: "What possible states
can this object be in?" and "What possible behavior can this object perform?". Make
sure to write down your observations. As you do, you'll notice that real-world objects
vary in complexity; your desktop lamp may have only two possible states (on and off)
and two possible behaviors (turn on, turn off), but your desktop radio might have
additional states (on, off, current volume, current station) and behavior (turn on, turn
off, increase volume, decrease volume, seek, scan, and tune). You may also notice
that some objects, in turn, will also contain other objects. These real-world
observations all translate into the world of object-oriented programming.
 A software object.

Software objects are conceptually similar to real-world objects: they too consist of
state and related behavior. An object stores its state in fields (variables in some
programming languages) and exposes its behavior through methods (functions in
some programming languages). Methods operate on an object's internal state and
serve as the primary mechanism for object-to-object communication. Hiding internal
state and requiring all interaction to be performed through an object's methods is
known as data encapsulation — a fundamental principle of object-oriented
programming.

Consider a bicycle, for example:

A bicycle modeled as a software object.

By attributing state (current speed, current pedal cadence, and current gear) and
providing methods for changing that state, the object remains in control of how the
outside world is allowed to use it. For example, if the bicycle only has 6 gears, a
method to change gears could reject any value that is less than 1 or greater than 6.

Bundling code into individual software objects provides a number of benefits,

including:
 1. Modularity: The source code for an object can be written and maintained
independently of the source code for other objects. Once created, an object can
be easily passed around inside the system.
2. Information-hiding: By interacting only with an object's methods, the details
of its internal implementation remain hidden from the outside world.
3. Code re-use: If an object already exists (perhaps written by another software
developer), you can use that object in your program. This allows specialists to
implement/test/debug complex, task-specific objects, which you can then trust
to run in your own code.
4. Pluggability and debugging ease: If a particular object turns out to be
problematic, you can simply remove it from your application and plug in a
different object as its replacement. This is analogous to fixing mechanical
problems in the real world. If a bolt breaks, you replace it, not the entire
machine.

What Is a Class?
In the real world, you'll often find many individual objects all of the same kind. There
may be thousands of other bicycles in existence, all of the same make and model.
Each bicycle was built from the same set of blueprints and therefore contains the same
components. In object-oriented terms, we say that your bicycle is an instance of the
class of objects known as bicycles. A class is the blueprint from which individual
objects are created.

The following Bicycle class is one possible implementation of a bicycle:

class Bicycle {

int cadence = 0;
int speed = 0;
int gear = 1;

void changeCadence(int newValue) {

cadence = newValue;
}

void changeGear(int newValue) {

gear = newValue;
}

void speedUp(int increment) {

speed = speed + increment;
}

void applyBrakes(int decrement) {

speed = speed - decrement;
}

void printStates() {
System.out.println("cadence:"+cadence+" speed:"+speed+"
gear:"+gear);
}
}
The syntax of the Java programming language will look new to you, but the design of
this class is based on the previous discussion of bicycle objects. The fields cadence,
speed, and gear represent the object's state, and the methods (changeCadence,
changeGear, speedUp etc.) define its interaction with the outside world.

You may have noticed that the Bicycle class does not contain a main method. That's
because it's not a complete application; it's just the blueprint for bicycles that might be
used in an application. The responsibility of creating and using new Bicycle objects
belongs to some other class in your application.

Here's a BicycleDemo class that creates two separate Bicycle objects and invokes
their methods:

class BicycleDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {

// Create two different Bicycle objects

Bicycle bike1 = new Bicycle();
Bicycle bike2 = new Bicycle();

// Invoke methods on those objects

bike1.changeCadence(50);
bike1.speedUp(10);
bike1.changeGear(2);
bike1.printStates();

bike2.changeCadence(50);
bike2.speedUp(10);
bike2.changeGear(2);
bike2.changeCadence(40);
bike2.speedUp(10);
bike2.changeGear(3);
bike2.printStates();
}
}

The output of this test prints the ending pedal cadence, speed, and gear for the two
bicycles:
cadence:50 speed:10 gear:2
cadence:40 speed:20 gear:3

What Is Inheritance?
Different kinds of objects often have a certain amount in common with each other.
Mountain bikes, road bikes, and tandem bikes, for example, all share the
characteristics of bicycles (current speed, current pedal cadence, current gear). Yet
each also defines additional features that make them different: tandem bicycles have
two seats and two sets of handlebars; road bikes have drop handlebars; some
mountain bikes have an additional chain ring, giving them a lower gear ratio.

Object-oriented programming allows classes to inherit commonly used state and

behavior from other classes. In this example, Bicycle now becomes the superclass of
MountainBike, RoadBike, and TandemBike. In the Java programming language, each
class is allowed to have one direct superclass, and each superclass has the potential
for an unlimited number of subclasses:
 A hierarchy of bicycle classes.

The syntax for creating a subclass is simple. At the beginning of your class
declaration, use the extends keyword, followed by the name of the class to inherit
from:

class MountainBike extends Bicycle {

// new fields and methods defining a mountain bike would go here

}
This gives MountainBike all the same fields and methods as Bicycle, yet allows its
code to focus exclusively on the features that make it unique. This makes code for
your subclasses easy to read. However, you must take care to properly document the
state and behavior that each superclass defines, since that code will not appear in the
source file of each subclass.
What Is an Interface?
As you've already learned, objects define their interaction with the outside world
through the methods that they expose. Methods form the object's interface with the
outside world; the buttons on the front of your television set, for example, are the
interface between you and the electrical wiring on the other side of its plastic casing.
You press the "power" button to turn the television on and off.

In its most common form, an interface is a group of related methods with empty
bodies. A bicycle's behavior, if specified as an interface, might appear as follows:

interface Bicycle {

void changeCadence(int newValue); // wheel revolutions per

minute

void changeGear(int newValue);

void speedUp(int increment);

 void applyBrakes(int decrement);
}
To implement this interface, the name of your class would change (to a particular
brand of bicycle, for example, such as ACMEBicycle), and you'd use the implements
keyword in the class declaration:
class ACMEBicycle implements Bicycle {

// remainder of this class implemented as before

}
Implementing an interface allows a class to become more formal about the behavior it
promises to provide. Interfaces form a contract between the class and the outside
world, and this contract is enforced at build time by the compiler. If your class claims
to implement an interface, all methods defined by that interface must appear in its
source code before the class will successfully compile.
Note: To actually compile the ACMEBicycle class, you'll need to add the public
keyword to the beginning of the implemented interface methods. You'll learn the
reasons for this later in the lessons on Classes and Objects and Interfaces and
Inheritance.
What Is a Package?
A package is a namespace that organizes a set of related classes and interfaces.
Conceptually you can think of packages as being similar to different folders on your
computer. You might keep HTML pages in one folder, images in another, and scripts
or applications in yet another. Because software written in the Java programming
language can be composed of hundreds or thousands of individual classes, it makes
sense to keep things organized by placing related classes and interfaces into packages.

The Java platform provides an enormous class library (a set of packages) suitable for
use in your own applications. This library is known as the "Application Programming
Interface", or "API" for short. Its packages represent the tasks most commonly
associated with general-purpose programming. For example, a String object contains
state and behavior for character strings; a File object allows a programmer to easily
create, delete, inspect, compare, or modify a file on the filesystem; a Socket object
allows for the creation and use of network sockets; various GUI objects control
buttons and checkboxes and anything else related to graphical user interfaces. There
are literally thousands of classes to choose from. This allows you, the programmer, to
focus on the design of your particular application, rather than the infrastructure
required to make it work.

The Java Platform API Specification contains the complete listing for all packages,
interfaces, classes, fields, and methods supplied by the Java Platform 6, Standard
Edition. Load the page in your browser and bookmark it. As a programmer, it will
become your single most important piece of reference documentation.

This lesson discusses the basics of applets, how to develop applets that interact richly
with their environment, and how to deploy applets.

An applet is a special kind of Java program that a browser enabled with Java
technology can download from the internet and run. An applet is typically embedded
inside a web page and runs in the context of a browser. An applet must be a subclass
of the java.applet.Applet class. The Applet class provides the standard interface
between the applet and the browser environment.

Swing provides a special subclass of the Applet class called javax.swing.JApplet.

The JApplet class should be used for all applets that use Swing components to
construct their graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

The browser's Java Plug-in software manages the lifecycle of an applet